"Hanky Panky" was written in 1963 by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. They were in the middle of a recording session for their group The Raindrops and realized they needed a B-side to a single, "That Boy John". The duo then went into the hall and penned the song in 20 minutes. Barry and Greenwich weren't particularly pleased with the song and deemed it inferior to the rest of their work. "I was surprised when Tommy James' version was released," Barry commented to Billboard's Fred Bronson, "As far as I was concerned it was a terrible song. In my mind it wasn't written to be a song, just a B-side." Although only a B-side, "Hanky Panky" became popular with garage rock bands. Tommy James heard it being performed by one such group in a club in South Bend, Indiana. James' version was recorded at a local radio station, WNIL in Niles, Michigan, and released on local Snap Records, selling well in the tri-state area of Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. However, lacking national distribution, the single quickly disappeared. James moved on, breaking up The Shondells, and finished high school. In 1965, an unemployed James was contacted by Pittsburgh disc jockey "Mad Mike" Metro who had begun playing The Shondells' version of "Hanky Panky" and the single had become popular in that area. James then decided to re-release the song, traveling to Pittsburgh where he hired the first decent local band he ran into, The Raconteurs, to be the new Shondells (the original members having declined to re-form). After appearances on TV and in clubs in the city, James took a master of "Hanky Panky" to New York, where he sold it to Roulette Records. "The amazing thing is we did not re-record the song," James told Bronson, "I don't think anybody can record a song that bad and make it sound good. It had to sound amateurish like that. I think if we'd fooled with it too much we'd have fouled it up." It was released promptly and went all the way to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 where it remained for two weeks in July 1966.
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